Written by Luisa Gibbons
We’ve seen a cultural shift across many of the food and beverage companies we work with, with an increasing appreciation of the value of outsourcing elements of innovation to specialist partners as opposed to trying to keep everything in house. This is increasingly important as head counts are reduced to manage overheads yet challenging targets for growth remain!
The key is selecting the right partners – those that can challenge your thinking, bring additional expertise and take you to a better place as a result. But importantly do so in a way that builds on your internal capabilities, expertise and culture to ensure maximum success.
When looking to select an innovation partner, we’d recommend the following 5 core considerations:
1
Trust
Finding the right external partner that you can trust with your sensitive information. Look for an organisation that has the right credentials and with advocates you can call on to verify their capabilities.
2
Intellectual Property
Ensure that you understand the IP rights and have a clear agreement in place before you commence as this can lead to difficulties later on. Think of it as prenup for innovation!
3
Clear Objectives
Do you know what you need from a provider? Is it to create the strategy or to accelerate parts of a complex project that need expertise?
4
Cultural Fit
It can be a disruptive or even threatening experience for incumbent teams to have external providers coming into the organisation. Do they have the emotional intelligence to navigate the political fallout? What is the ideal balance between outsourcing and collaboration?
5
Cost
Outsourcing should not be viewed as a way to save cost; innovation is not a quantifiable discipline to the same degree as a call center or an office catering contract, where the variables are all known and therefore a robust cost can be applied. It's therefore essential that costs of outsourcing are balanced with the risk of not innovating effectively.
It’s not always an easy decision, and we’ll always invest time to build relationships with clients that are looking to outsource all or some of their innovation process to KICR (both decision makers and those that will be involved on a day-to-day basis).
In our next post, we’ll share some of the main benefits of outsourcing to help demonstrate why this selection process really can be worth it!
